The Brainfever Bird- Book Review

Recently finished reading this novel called: The Brainfever Bird by Allan Sealy. Thought i should write something about my impressions. To me this isn't a book where you go rushing on the highway of reading at 60 /70 pages an hour. It has a languid charm which beckons to be absorbed as opposed to be observed. It's about relationships: some named, mostly unnamed/un-nameable!
On surface, it is about a redundant Russian scientist's sojourn into India hoping to sell his expertise in bio-weapons; however, the plot often takes a backseat. What contributes to the novel's distinctive edge is the intense and poignant portrayal of personal conflicts, all puppets, so elegant in their external embroidaries, yet helplessly being swayed in the sinister drift of circumstances. No wonder, then, the leading lady, the novelist's muse is a pupetter by profession , and may be, prophetically nomenclatured as Maya. Of all the characters she is the most interesting as well as the most unstable one. She is full of contradictory vibes and yet draws admirers like moths to the flame, willing to plunge themselves in the vortex of her dangerous, fragile self. She is subtly compared to Razia,the warrior princess and the only female ruler of Delhi, although able yet brought down by her enemies. Living in Old Delhi, at stone's throw from Razia's tomb, she tries to come to terms wit her past while discerning her future.
Allan Sealy's words have the fluidity of prose. There are some really wonderful imageries , strewn unevenly across the story! Some excerpts from the book:

"Youth is a country. I used to live there. The inhabitants are deterimned to emigrate, exiles long to return. But the borders are sealed, as if plague had broken out there and the United Nations had sent highly paid soldiers to patrol the passes."..
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.. ... The battle of the kings was the climax of the show. All puppets fought, a child in the audience learnt: that was their nature. They danced and they crowed and they fought. ....... How the kings fought when all their men lay dead! Here was their essence, in this eternal turning and hurling of oneself at the other, so that every terrible thump turned to flesh and bone the cottony wadding you knew inside, turned also the birdlike cries into a voice which could easily be yours, thinned and twisted in pain. Till you saw that the strings by which they swung, far from being the proof of their unreality, as your older cousin whispered, were the very stuff of their suffering. The pain was in the strings. But what if ( and this thought pricked you hard so you woke up and lay their staring with your hands clapped in your ears) what if some of the people in the audience who had sat watching with you, who brushed your arm or leaned against you, were also puppets- had cloth in them? What if- impossible! someone in your family...? And then your eyes went quite round with terror as the possibility sank in. What if you yourself were a puppet?"
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